Chapter 24
The next morning, I’m woken up by the gut-wrenching sensation of no longer being alone.
Head pounding slightly from last night’s prosecco, I try falling back asleep, telling myself it’s merely a remnant of a forgotten nightmare. Yet I can’t shake the sensation of being watched. I pry open a single weighted eye—coming face to face with a figure mere inches from me.
I flinch back and fumble around for my switchblade, heart rising up my throat in a panic—
When I recognize a friendly face in the lamplight.
“For fuck’s sake, Cec.” I pull the sheets up around me, even though he can’t see anything. “You scared the shit out of me.”
“It’s not my fault you’re so easily startled,” Cec argues. “And that you sleep like you’re dead to the world.”
He gets to his feet, a lit oil lamp grasped in one hand and a key in the other.
“I have good reason when you break into my goddamned room.”
He sighs. “How is it you swear more when you’re half asleep?”
I grimace. “Maybe it has something to do with you entering my room unannounced and waking me from a peaceful slumber.”
He shrugs. “That’s fair. I actually came in—”
“Wait, how did you get in?” I demand, cutting him off. “I distinctly remember locking the door after you and Bes left.”
He scratches at his jaw and purposefully avoids looking near me. “My father has a master key. I borrow it from time to time.”
He continues before I can express my disgust. “It also opens the door to the kitchen galley.”
I snort. “That makes more sense.”
He pats his flat stomach. “I’m a growing boy.”
I thread my fingers through my mess of hair, pulling at the knots. “Not that I’m not happy to see you, but what are you doing here?”
He sighs. “I couldn’t sleep. I was mm… fraternizing with someone, and when they left, I found I wasn’t tired.”
Fraternizing? “Is that what we’re calling it these days?” I turn to face him fully, crossing my arms. “Would I know this fellow fraternizer?”
He drops his chin to his chest. “You would.”
“Well, go on, out with it.”
“It’s Anders,” he admits.
“Anders? I—” I cut myself off. I think back to when we met Anders, how Cec looked relieved at the docks.
“So all that talk about getting caught with Gino’s daughters?”
Cec grimaces. “That’s also true, unfortunately for me.”
“You are a busy man.” I chuckle, then sober. “Is this the first time you two have…?”
“Now, Hawkins, I don’t kiss and tell,” he says, more himself again.
“You just did.”
He continues as if I didn’t say anything, “But since you asked: no, it’s not.”
“Then why act like you barely knew him?”
He shakes his head. “This place, these people—it’s no easy thing. Being with someone else who understands all of it, without anyone else knowing, makes the loneliness more manageable. Even if only for a few hours.”
“A few hours?” I raise a brow. “My, my, we are ambitious.”
“However,” he starts, “the reason I couldn’t sleep is because I can’t get my mind to pipe down. Ever since we got here, I’ve heard rumblings of a spy hiding inside the Order. There’s been a scattering of names, but a few people have named Anders specifically.”
I consider this. Although I barely know him, Anders doesn’t seem like he’d align himself with the Third Reich. But I haven’t spent enough time in the company of either to be completely certain.
“Do you think he’s a spy?”
He answers my question with another question. “Do you ever truly know someone? Even our own parents can be mysteries.”
Tell me about it.
I rub my forehead. I don’t know if I can handle another mystery to solve so early in the morning. “If Anders were a fascist spy, he wouldn’t have driven us here in the first place. He would’ve killed us and taken the amulet. Told the order we never made it to port.”
He sighs. “I suppose you’re right.”
“Anders being a spy is the least of my worries, Cec. And it should be the least of yours as well.”
“Yes, well, my father certainly knows how to shift people’s priorities to himself,” he mumbles.
He takes a knee in front of me before I can formulate a response. “I won’t let anything happen to you here, Hawkins.” He juts out his chin. “You may not have any family here, but you have Bes and me. And we protect our family, to whatever end.”
I grab his hand, wishing he’d said this in front of his father yesterday.
Maybe it’s because I’m still half-asleep, but I decide to share a part of myself with him. “You are the only family I’ve got here, Cec.”
He actually blushes. “Glad we agree on that front. You shouldn’t dismiss Bes so quickly, though. Not that you want him as your actual family, of course—that would be quite a scandal. But the stubborn bloke doesn’t open up to people often.”
“Why is that?” I wonder.
Cec moves to the bed, removing his hand from mine.
“That’s a complicated question. He’s had a difficult past, to say the least.” Cec sighs.
“He should be the one to tell you this, but he hates to talk about it.” He presses his hands together tight before continuing.
“Bes was born in Egypt, raised by his parents until he was eight, when his mother brought him here.”
My brow furrows. “What happened when he was eight?”
Sadness draws down his mouth. “His father was murdered at the market by a British soldier who claimed he caught him stealing a pair of earrings red-handed. The vendor who sold them didn’t dare contradict him, and his father knew they’d have no money to buy food if he was arrested. So, he ran.”
“Shit,” I swear softly.
“The worst of it is that he bought the earrings for Bes’s mother once she returned home from her dig, with money he’d been saving up for months.”
I wince. How awful. And preventable. I know what it’s like to lose a parent… it never leaves you. But for Bes’s father to choose the more likely outcome of death over life? Over his family? That does something to a person. God, poor Bes.
“And I thought I had a complicated family history.”
“There’s more, but that story tells you all you need to know about why Bes is the way he is.
Despite his deep-seeded hatred for the British because of what they did to his father, he chose to go to school there.
Even fully adopted their accent and their love of brooding, all without making a fuss about how much it killed him to do it. ”
My chest aches for Bes. He had to do whatever he could to fit in, to not stand out. His father tried to defy those in charge, and it got him killed. No wonder he likes to follow the rules.
I cross my arms over my chest. “How do you explain your accent, then.”
“I have an excuse,” he claims. “I’ve been going to school in London all my life.”
“Then why does he do it?” I ask.
“The uncomplicated reason is he had no choice. Bes is like a chameleon—his natural state of being is doing whatever it takes to blend in to his surroundings. To go unnoticed and survive for as long as he can.”
Just as I thought.
“Wouldn’t that be a sight, Bes with shifty eyes, a tail, and a long tongue,” I mutter wryly, while also lamenting Bes’s lost childhood.
Cec chuckles. “Wake him up from a deep sleep and you might.” He pats my hand. “Give him a chance, Hawkins.”
I want to take Cec’s advice to heart, but I don’t open up easily either. I can’t deny the attraction between us, yet I’m not certain I could allow it to be more than that.
“I’ll consider it.”
He nods. “Good, perhaps he’ll stop brooding then.”
“I don’t think he’ll ever stop brooding.”
Cec laughs and makes for the door.
“Oh, and Cec? Anders isn’t the spy.” At my words, he pauses in the threshold. “I feel it in my gut.”
“Even if he is,” Cec reasons, “best to keep your friends close and your enemies closer, eh?”
“Another motto of the order?”
“That’s my own personal one.” He glances back and points near me. “Don’t you forget it, either.”
“Cec, wait,” I say before he can close the door. “Now that you’ve so rudely awakened me, will you find Bes and take me to see your father. I have some questions for him.”
He bows his head. “I’ll come back to get you.”
He disappears without waiting for an answer and closes the door behind him, leaving me in the dark.
I fumble for a match, lighting the candle at my bedside as the amulet shifts against my chest. Before I get up, I grasp the amulet in my palm.
The gold merely glimmers in the firelight, nothing more.
No sensation of warmth. I still don’t think I’m imagining either of those things, but I hope to God that Ansaldo has some information on it.
Maybe even the incantation that’ll activate it.
This whole endeavor might not have gone to plan, but I’m not going to let it be a total loss.
I won’t let Ansaldo take anything else from me.
An hour later, I find myself in Ansaldo’s office, along with Bes and Cec.
But no Ansaldo.
After Cec left, I got dressed and began to decide which questions I need to ask, my anger at Ansaldo returning to clear some of the sleep clogging my mind.
My main concerns remain the Amulet of Amun and Nonna.
Some part of me knows I’m using the amulet as a distraction from thinking about my nonna, but I allow it.
Now, standing awkwardly inside Ansaldo’s office, I run my hands along my khaki pants tucked inside my mother’s boots, eyeing a loose string from one of the buttons on my white, long sleeve button-up.
I hope I haven’t made a mistake by seeking him out.
While there’s a chance I’m going to get what I ask for—answers about my family’s role in the order—there’s also a chance he’ll tie me to one of these chairs, bring in the tattoo tools, and force me to join the order right here, right now.